THE SPHERE OF MEANINGS OF RELIGIOUS PEOPLE (THE CASE OF ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS)

Psychology of religious people, especially their sphere of meaning, becomes an important topic in the light of modern tendencies of Russian psychological science (namely, the anthropological turn - psychology of a whole person instead of psychology of activity, or consciousness, personality, etc.). We have performed a qualitative study of the sphere of meaning of religious people. Two research questions were posed: (1) How does religious meaning first appear in the life-world of participants? and (2) What processes occur in the sphere of meaning of a person that is already religious? In order to address these questions we conducted an in-depth semi-structured interview with members of the Russian Orthodox Church that participated in its sacramental life for a period of 6-7 years. We asked our participants (N=7) to tell us about their conversion and about the happy or sad experience(s) that they were going through at the moment. We did not limit such experience to religious domain in order to discover non-religious meanings in the life-world of participants and their interaction with the religious ones. We used descriptive and interpretative approaches of analysis including such techniques as marking meaning units, meaning condensation and marking of topics, which were then interpreted in the light of research questions. The validity of results was based on self-consistency and credibility of the arguments of the researcher. The first result of our research is that we have shown the moment of generation of the religious meaning. It coincides with the appearance of God as a personality in the life-world of a participant. This appearance is made possible by virtue of the leap of faith taken by a person and manifested in a sincere and wholehearted call to God. The second condition for the appearance of the religious meaning has been found to be the divine answer experienced by a person in the form of a response to the request. These two facts of the participant's life-world lead to the creation of the religious meaning - "standing before" and turning to God. The second result of our research is that we have shown the development of the believer's semantic picture, which unfolds through a semantic dialogue with God. This dialogue is based on the hope that all life events are a manifestation of the "Divine Providence" and "God's will for man". The very essence of the dialogue is to recognize one's own meanings of the life-world and meanings of the Other or other people and to attempt to view meanings of others as one's own. A life-world without any boundaries between the internal and external meaning content ("sacral world") while keeping one's personality and freedom is the perfect outcome of the semantic dialogue. The crucial spiritual meaning for the participants has been found to be love, realization of which becomes possible in the process of leap-of-trust, which implies denial of egocentric and group meanings.